Green Topics brings you the latest information on the constantly evolving Green Movement. We aim to inform people about anything green or anything we think is of importance to discuss. Feel free to give us suggestions!

Jul 12, 2010

Your own Personal Home Electric Load Analysis

Here are the tools for you to do your own personal assessment of home energy use.
Any family considering a life either off the grid or using less energy must first assess how much electricity they use currently and how simple steps can cut the use.

A Personal Home Electric Load Analysis is easy. You will need to get some spec data on the given appliance or AC load as it is called and this can be gotten from the packaging or where you purchase the item or from the vendor's web site.

Let's do a for instance with a Compact Fluorescent light bulb(example #1) that you leave on for 4 hrs per day

AC Loads Volts x Amps = Watts x Hours/Day= Avg Watt hours/day

1. CF Light Bulb 120V x .17A = 20.4W x 4hrs/day = 81.6 watt hours/Day

now if you have 10 bulbs in the house that are left on each evening your total usage is
10 x 81.6 = 816 watt hours per day which is almost a kilowatt(1000 watts) hour per day

Since your electricity bill is in kilowatt hours per day and easily visible on your bill, you can see that even 10 small CF bulbs can take a lot of energy to power

Let's look at an appliance with a larger amperage but which you use for a smaller amount of time each day, perhaps a well pump(example #2) that only comes on for 15 mins per day

AC Loads Volts x Amps = Watts x Hours/Day= Avg Watt hours/day

2. Well pump 120V x 13A = 1560W x .25 = 390 Watt hrs/Day

Even though the amperage is high the pump uses less total energy than the 10 CF bulbs combined.

So the mix of power draw and time expended for the draw are both important as we see.

Since this can be boring work, why don't you just take the most used room in the house and do your calculation. That is probably the den or may be the kitchen if the dining room is attached.

This is a great exercise to do with school age kids above 6th grade. It teaches personal responsibility and installs some angst over the waste of electricity.

After you have made your calculations, you can then try to cut the use down a bit. If you were using 10 of the CF bulbs per nite. Maybe you can cut that down to 6 per nite or a savings of 320 watt hours per day.

You'll find the kitchen appliances are large energy hogs even if used for a small portion of the day.Of course heating and air if electric is a gigantic hog.

Should you find this exercise enlightening you can extrapolate the load analysis to be a total home analysis to find the sources of all electric consumption.

I suppose this total load analysis should about equal what your utility charges you excepting taxes.